The Exchanges

Q Why do you think that Adley, ah, it sounded like you're saying that there were, that there are things you wish had gone differently. Ultimately, why do you think it ended up the way it did?

A Well, Adley is still around, I should say, ah, and we've got a stable company, but I think we did a couple things wrong. So, Very early on, I was very public, Sean was very public with our belief that in-stream advertising would be the way that ads were delivered, as opposed to at the boundaries of your periphery where nobody looks. And everyone at Twitter said it would never happen, everyone at Facebook said it would never happen, but of course that's where all their money is coming from, so we nailed that. Um, I think we made a couple mistakes. One is, I always believed we should focus on long tail, and we did build a long tail business, but as we became incredibly well known, every celebrity wanted to work for us, so we started Focusing on the celebrity business, and I think that was harder to build. Number two is platform risk. As an entrepreneur, you just can't put all your eggs in one platform. You really have to have three or four different platforms, and I don't think we were quick enough to recognize Pinterest, Reddit, YouTube, and other platforms we could have, uh, monetized through.

AI assessment note: “I think we made a couple mistakes. One is... Number two is platform risk.”

Q down becomes a chore, and I don't follow up. That remembering to go and look it up, often I forget, and if I do remember, I don't have the time to go and quickly sneak off and find out what Rob's wife's name is, for example. Rob Walling was on earlier. Is it just that you have a gift, Mark, or do you have some process for systematically remembering it?

A I don't have a process, so I will tell you a couple things. Number one is I do, in my contacts, try to write people's, spouses' names down and kids' names down if I, if I can. If I'm there and if I remember, I'll just write it down. Um, and I don't do it, like, I don't go to see somebody and say, let me look at their wife's name before I see them. I don't do that. But where it happens, honestly, is I'll see them out with their wife and I'll go, oh crap, what's her name? And just knowing that I can get my alternate brain out and remember her wife's name so I don't feel embarrassed. But no, I would say to you, first of all, all of our brains are wired very differently. Uh, and I think some people are just able to remember or not. I'll tell you a trick that they teach you in sales. When you meet someone new, you're supposed to use their name in a sentence three times within a minute of meeting them. It's what politicians do, what salespeople do. So if I say Andrew, you know, that's an interesting name because my son's name is Andrew, and so I should always remember that name Andrew, but you tend to go by Andrew or Andy. And just by saying that, I'm not likely to forget your name. And number two is association. So if I can associate you with something, that makes me more likely to remember your name. But regarding names, names I'm not always great on, but I always remember circumst…

AI assessment note: “I don't have a process, so I will tell you a couple things.”

Q was going on, what was going to happen beyond the future. I was admired how you did that. Do you have enough of an awareness of your process To understand how you can do that, how you can pick up on things that aren't in the form that a company's doing today, and how you can figure out where they're going, or where you think they're even going to go?

A Well, I would say this, um, number one is just when you see deal after deal after deal after deal, you start to be able to make sense of them, so part of being a VC is just seeing a lot of deals, because then you can, you can recognize patterns, and you have to be careful about patterns, Um, I, I will sound insincere when I say what I'm about to say, but I actually don't think, you know, I'm that clever. I don't think I have to be that clever. I think that the problem investors get into is if you think you're smarter than the entrepreneur. What I'm really looking for is an entrepreneur who has an idea that they're so incredibly passionate about. They seem to have Extra insight into where things are going to happen, and you're backing their intuition, not your own. Now, it has to be something you feel like intuitively you understand, but you take the guys at Lookout, you know, they decided that they believed that mobile phones weren't secure. They were cheeky enough to go on the red carpet at the Oscars with a backpack, with sniffing equipment, and sniff all the information off the phone. It's like, you find people like that, and you want to back them, so on that, on that call, It was a small, unheard of company somewhere in Europe, I think in Hungary, called Prezi.

AI assessment note: “part of being a VC is just seeing a lot of deals, because then you can”

Q me if about my, my fiance, and you said, are you comfortable using the word fiance yet? And since then we've been married, but I, I was amazed that you would remember it since we hadn't really come across each other much. I hadn't talked about it publicly. I wonder, do you have a process for remembering those kinds of details about people? Because it really goes a long way.

A Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm a, uh, uh, I'm in a people oriented business, uh, I think a lot of VCs are overly analytical and maybe lack that empathy, and probably in some senses are book smarter than I am, but I don't actually think it's a book smart business. So when I first got into business and looked at the elders that I respected, what it seemed that they had was a curiosity to understand what's behind the people. What are their drivers? What are their motivations? Because markets are gonna change, funding environments gonna change, competition's gonna change, and, and life circumstances change. Your co-founder gets married, or has a kid, or gets a drinking problem, or has depression, or, you know, I've seen everything. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've seen everything. At my company, one of my employees came in, With a full bottle of, uh, scotch, and three quarters of it drunk just by him.

AI assessment note: “what it seemed that they had was a curiosity to understand what's behind the people.”